Seymour arrived on the scene just in time to see Penny’s Teacher’s Pet familiar conjure up one of its special scrolls. The spectral book’s neophyte-ranked power was the ability to absorb up to three harmful spells at a time. Because of the Arcane Tutor trait Penny had received upon evolving her Arcanum Collector class, her familiars effectively operated at a rank higher than normal. For the Teacher's Pet, this gave it an additional, adept-ranked ability: it could create unique scrolls which combined elements of the spells it had stolen and were usable by Penny only.

  The scroll it had just conjured—more accurately a single, ghostly page which the book had shaken loose—shimmered in the air as it fluttered down into Penny’s hands. After rushing toward the sound of her voice, Seymour had turned a corner in the hedge maze and suddenly found himself standing directly behind her as she engaged in battle.

  He spied over her shoulder to take in the situation as quickly as he could:

  No more than fifteen feet further ahead along the hedge corridor, Thornton laid face down in the snow. The Apocalyptic Gardener didn’t look to be moving and Seymour couldn’t be sure if he was even still alive, though it registered with him in the moment that the snow remained clean and white, at least – not dyed red with blood.

  A towering figure loomed over Thornton, draped in a tattered and filthy brown robe. A hood hid its face, filled with dark shadows. Seymour guessed the reaper-coded creature stood around eight or nine feet tall, and the way its body filled out its robe made clear that whatever this thing was, it was too lumpy and misshapen to be called a proper humanoid. Its sluggish, disjointed movements had a quality like a puppet being driven by a blind person. Along the same vein, its hunched-over posture made it look like something Jim Henson might have come up with on a bad ayahuasca trip; the ultra-evil offspring of those bird-things from The Dark Crystal and Cthulhu.

  The figure floated, swaying in the air several inches off the snowy ground, with no feet visible below the bottom hem of its robe. But from each sleeve a hand protruded, human-like but made entirely from woodsy, twisted root-stuff.

  Right on cue, the creature drew open its robes to reveal its boil-infested torso, pulsating with virulent energy. A mishmash of plant-meat and man-flesh melded together as one, resulting in a skin not unlike that of an evil avocado. The hood fell back and Seymour finally saw the horror for what it truly was. He staggered back involuntarily like he’d been slugged in the gut.

  The monster’s face belonged to Handsome Gentry the Bard, but that stage name had become a sick joke, with blood-encrusted roots slithering out from all of his facial orifices—eye-sockets, nostrils, and especially from his gaping mouth, its jaw dislocated—hungrily seeking in the air like carnivorous worms. It looked as though Gentry’s head had been decapitated and then mounted flat upon the monster’s upper-chest like a trophy hung on the wall of a hunting cabin. But it was worse than that; worse than a mere murder trophy. Something or someone had inflicted this fate upon him, double-desecrating his corpse, turning him into the undead tree nursery which now levitated over Thornton’s prostrate form.

  What had first appeared to be huge, pus-filled boils turned out to be the gestation pods described by Seymour’s Sanguine Sight. A large pod on its abdomen suddenly swelled up to a ludicrous size and the green skin stretched so thin that it became partially translucent. Within, a topiary animal of some sort was beginning to awaken and writhe. It looked close to fully grown already.

  Before the pod could burst and birth out another topiary monster, Penny activated the scroll which her minion had only just conjured:

  Penny’s scroll successfully contained the pod monster inside a square cage made of nettle-covered vines, but Seymour doubted the itching effect or the summoned spiders would have much effect on the weird ass Surrogate Nursery creature.

  This struck him as an obviously baked-in limitation of her familiar’s scroll-making ability: the magic effects it absorbed were likely to sometimes have less effect against the enemies who wielded them in the first place. What good were more brain-eating worms going to do against this desecrated version of Handsome Gentry, who looked like he was already filled up to his brim with a shit-ton of brain-eating worms?

  Seymour watched in horror then as Penny dashed forward, bee-lining for the hideous monster and its about-to-burst mega-boil. She hadn’t even noticed that he had shown up in the moment before her minion had spit out the scroll. Her focus was fixed solely on the fight in front of her – on rescuing Thornton from the bad turn the combat had taken right before Seymour arrived.

  She soon stood over Thornton where he still laid face-down in the snow. And then suddenly she was holding what appeared to be a large spaghetti squash. She cracked it open, pushing her fingers through the soft rind and tearing it in two, and the stringy guts inside came out in a surprisingly fluid gush, pouring all over Thornton. Next she knelt to hook both hands under his armpits and haul him up into a sitting position.

  “Thornton!” she cried. Seymour could hear that her voice was ragged from all the screaming she had already done. “The shield, Thornton. Now! Cast it now!”

  The pod monster burst through Penny’s nettle-cage. The spider-summoning aspect of her scroll ended abruptly, its continuation having been tied to the integrity of the cage. The scroll had bought Penny enough time to revive Thornton with one of his healing pods – but that was all it had accomplished. The Surrogate Nursery appeared to be completely unphased, although it did have a bunch of creepy-looking wooden spiders crawling all over it now.

  The distended pod on its gut finally burst with a sick squishing sound. What looked like a wet lump of leaves sloughed out but Seymour cursed, immediately recognizing it as another of the plant-based mimics.

  Thornton regained his bearings and snapped into action, activating his Aggressive Reforestation power without moving from the spot where Penny had slimed him with the squash and sat him up. The gripping roots and vines which he’d earlier used to entangle his enemies now snaked out from the ground below and the hedge walls on either side to form a protective cocoon around himself and Penny, instead. The result looked something like a giant acorn, but because it was made from roots and vines there were gaps and slits rather than a solid shell.

  It impressed Seymour to see that the Aggressive Reforestation spell he’d helped Thornton catalyze weeks ago seemed to adapt automatically to the task of protecting friendly targets rather than impeding hostile ones. He’d witnessed it used for the latter purpose several times while observing the early part of the crawl on the testing chamber’s crystal display, but this was the first he’d seen of its defensive utility.

  But while the barrier had effectively blocked the Surrogate Nursery’s path, its newborn plant-mimic had barely been slowed by it. Its form became a liquefied mass of dark green moss and it slimed into Thornton’s sphere of guardian vines like a slug, slithering through a crack that only a moment earlier would have been too tight for it to fit through.

  Thornton immediately reached out and cast his Compost spell, not on the mimic, but rather on the cage he’d conjured – so that he and Penny could escape it more quickly. The side nearest Seymour—and opposite the pod-monster—rapidly withered and shrunk down to become a small gourd vegetable. He watched Penny scoop it up as she and Thornton scrambled out of the rotted opening, frantically emerging on their hands and knees in the snow. Fortunately, the other half of the cage remained and was still proving an effective obstacle against the Surrogate Nursery, whose awkward and ponderous movements left it ill-equipped to navigate through the remnants of Thornton’s Aggressive Reforestation.

  The newborn mimic, on the other hand, didn’t find the remnants of the abandoned vine-cage to be anything more than a speedbump. It continued to slime along, right on Penny’s heels, and she was practically crawling over Thornton to escape.

  Another pod burst on the pod monster’s abdomen, this time releasing a putrid brown cloud which began to fill the hedge corridor and move in the direction of the humans. Penny’s ghostly book flapped its way through the air to intercept the noxious attack, flinging open its bindings and vacuuming up the entire brown cloud like a force of nature. Then it flapped its way back to hover in the air over the mimic, where it attempted to attack by firing its non-corporeal pages at the creature, but the sepia-toned sheets of ghost-parchment disappeared harmlessly into the monster’s mossy hide.

  Seymour had watched all of this play out in only a handful of seconds. He now found himself standing directly in the path of Penny and Thornton as they struggled to crawl through the snow and attempted to flee, with the plant-mimic undulating along right on their heels. It immediately became obvious that it would overtake them in the moments to come. If Seymour couldn’t intervene in time, he’d have a front row view of their bloody dismemberment.